Couldn't the Reddit software engineers manually force subreddits to become public at any time? Why don't they do that?
They'd be overrun by spam, bots and worse within hours without the moderators. That's the real leverage here.
The Reddit blackout will continue
151–160 of 565 posts
Re: The Reddit blackout will continue
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they bored people with "we listened" PR waffling while just being more sneaky about user-hostile changes, they could have gotten away with anything. I mean, that's the playbook, isn't it? But blatantly giving your unhappy users the finger is a great way to keep them angry and thus motivated. Steve Huffman has set millions of dollars of value on fire and damaged Reddit's brand for no apparent reason (except maybe a…
> just being more sneaky about user-hostile changes, they could have gotten away with anything. I mean, that's the playbook, isn't it? Isn't that pretty much what Reddit was doing before spez came back as CEO, though? (Where being "sneaky" about user-hostile changes also included de-facto exempting the users they rely on most from them - their volunteer mods and, to some extent, their 'power' content contributors.) T…
Yeah, that's what they were doing, and it was working well enough. Dark patterns are evil but quite effective.
My guess is that investors are banging on the door wanting their payout, and the people on the other side of that door are panicking. Reddit Inc was probably a money furnace, like a dot-com of old. But it turns out a bunch of nerds and aficionados piping text through your servers does not equate to a hundred-billion-dollar business.
Re: The Reddit blackout will continue
#153This will fail. No one really cares about subreddit ABC and some will even be glad they can't compulsively look at it.
It really depends what the stats look like. If people hop to other subreddits, it'll fail. If traffic is down more than 50% for a week or two, the board will remove Spez.
Re: The Reddit blackout will continue
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It’s impressive how their CEO keeps shooting himself in the foot on this one You don't negotiate with blackmailers, because this is what this is now, blackmail. If things continue like this I give it 5 to 7 days until reddit the company forcefully removes these mods.
I give it 5 to 7 days until reddit the company forcefully removes these mods The impact of this would be to make lots of subreddit unmoderated, leading to a huge amount of spam, adult content in sfw subreddit, cross-posting, etc. The impact would be to let everyone know just how much free work the mods do to keep Reddit tidy and valuable. I don't think you're wrong (except maybe on the timescale) but I do think the s…
I say that if they -DO- remove the moderators, we should go back and be human spambots.
Re: The Reddit blackout will continue
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
Brian Lunduke back in 2019 when Reddit took $150 million from Tencent basically said that Reddit would be a company in trouble with in 5 years. His argument was that it shouldn't cost that much to run the place and as such they would have to start pleasing investors and not users. The argument was that you can buy an obscene amount of storage and bandwidth for only a fraction of the money they were raising. It is eve…
If they charged like $2/year/user for 3d party API access they'd be profitable and no one would be that outraged. Their expenses are still absurd given that, from my perspective they've literally done no improvement to the product in the last 5 years or more. Just maintain the API, have some staff to run the servers, pay a few admins to support the mods and feature freeze Reddit the site as much as possible. It's way…
>> If they charged like $2/month/user for 3d party API access they'd be profitable
But then the leadership would only be wealthy and not famous.
It feels like the focus on ad sales by so many platforms is due to their executives' personal preference in having broad ranging social influence (by playing gateway to the masses) instead of a predictable revenue stream.
Re: The Reddit blackout will continue
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Enough with the ChatGPT already. If you didn't write it, don't post it.
There really should be some law or adage coined for this by now. No one wants to hear GPT's opinion because it doesn't have one.
Nah, GPT's output can be very valuable and insightful. But you don't get it with a low effort "please summarize the key points of the text below\n\n{paste some text here}".
I propose the rule to be what it is already: put some effort into your comment, make it add something instead of just taking space and attention. This works for human and GPT and human/GPT ensemble commentary. And the prescription for low-effort spam? Downvote and flag.
Re: The Reddit blackout will continue
#157It's kinda dumb to go private as a protest, because visiting the home page as a lurker, there's no indication that anything is happening - just a different mix of subreddits hitting the default feed It's a little quieter, I kinda like it.
This will be short lived since I see moderation tooling being pretty key in handling content at the scale Reddit does. The API changes will nuke those and not just the user apps. It is also important to know that third party applications have yet to be shut down completely, most say they will be closing shop end of this month. Reddit is still benefiting and riding some of the "quality" it had before the shutdowns (think bots, automods, etc). I expect that will soon go away since the subreddits that aren't protesting are most likely still using third party tools to make moderation less arduous. Anyone who is intenting to exploit this does not yet have the opportunity.
Reddit is claiming they will reconcile the current issues with their moderation tooling, but if the app is any reflection of their ability to provide quality software, I wouldn't hold my breath.
So much to say: The true death of Reddit will be a slow one. The protest is just the first wave of their complications.
Re: The Reddit blackout will continue
#158I just opened my subs back up.
I mod a few subs for a niche hobby -- there's probably a few tens of thousands of us in the US. The majority of us are not especially technically inclined, and the only other place where the community regularly gathers online is Facebook Groups, which many of us want nothing to do with anymore.
I long ago largely stopped using reddit outside of the subs I mod, except browsing the front page briefly, or getting an answer from an internet search.
Tbc, reddit as a platform means nothing to me, and I'll happily move to another site. But, for the time being, this is where the community is, and this is where we're able to share information, some of which is safety-critical. I see the time I spend trying to keep the subs I mod welcoming and mostly free from hostility as a way to give back to the community.
I'm in the process of setting up a Lemmy server and plan to host similar forums there, but I intend to continue using reddit for at least as long as it's a primary gathering place for our community.
Re: The Reddit blackout will continue
#159I think a different approach would work better at this point. They need to stay up but use their subreddits to publicly plan Reddit "exits" for each community. Subreddits should start polls on where migrate to (discord, lemmy, mastodon, etc etc), and then start systematically cross posting anything posted to their subreddit to the new space, with comments turned off on the Reddit version. The key in a negotiation is…
Reddit announced a 5% headcount reduction a week ago: https://www.reuters.com/technology/reddit-lay-off-about-5-wo...
Interesting. But I'd say it still fits with the narrative. 5% is a good "we practice fiscal constraint" message. To get back to a reasonable cost basis, they need to lay off 50%, which would send a totally different message.